My top 10 disconnected observations about Mad Max: Fury Road

First, some news: my review of the relatively new Arnold Schwarzenegger zombie movie Maggie is up at Monstrum Athanaeum, and you can expect to see some more of my writing there in the near future.

Unrelatedly, I finally watched Mad Max: Fury Road last night, but since no one is paying for my opinion of that movie, prepare for my thoughts in their unsifted form:

1. It was a late night showing, and the projectionist put on Entourage by mistake. It took us a surprisingly long time to be sure we were watching the wrong movie, because Entourage begins with some sort of yacht party and jet skis, and water everywhere and no land in sight. But knowing that Mad Max is about a parched dystopia, I guess we all thought this might be a flashback of some sort... that the party might be interrupted by a nuclear flash. Even knowing now what we were watching, I think that would have been an improvement.

2. The actual opening of Fury Road is quite effective at breaking Max down. They use a trick I feel like I've seen work elsewhere as well: physically scarring the hero as a consequence of their loss (and not in a badass way, like the fashionable cheek or over-the-eye scar). We, the audience, know that the hero can get out of any jam they get into in Act 1 of their own movie. We also know, at least subconsciously, that no matter how dejected the hero gets it is likely to be turned around by the end of the movie; no matter how bloodied up he gets we know he can heal up and clean up in time for the final battle. But mutilations, burns, scars, and tattoos stay with the character no matter how sloppy or glib the writing gets--they have to matter. And because a hero's good looks are sacred in a franchise, this tactic rarely gets used. Max's involuntary tattoo is especially painful because the mark is a matter of identity and identification, and in particular because...

3. So often apocalypse fiction is, weirdly, a fantasy of self-expression. Stripped of our monoculture and commoditized comforts, everything we carry with us or surround ourselves with becomes an expression of character. One thing Fury Road does well is this characterization-through-objects. You see it in other apocalypses: consider your favorite survivors' choices of clothing, weapons of choice, equipment, and accoutrements. But I wonder what it says about us that we have this recurring collective daydream, that if civilization collapsed, and day-to-day survival was a struggle, we would just have so much more time for self-expression, you know?

4. A few absurdities aside, I've realized that Fury Road is the best--if nothing else, the most successfully audacious--piece of movie world-building that I've seen since the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

5. Relatedly, the thing that might have surprised me the most in Fury Road's scorched-earth world is the underlying sense that humanity is starting to crawl out from the wreckage of the apocalypse. My knowledge of the Mad Max mythos is spotty, but this possibility of rejuvenation seems like a new thing. But the people of the Citadel have dug a well deep enough to bring water to the surface. They've established hydroponics and even open-air gardens. Functioning trade networks are starting to emerge (the Citadel peacefully receives goods from Gas Town and the Bullet Farm, both separate settlements apparently devoted to producing and exporting a single commodity). By setting himself as a despotic god-king, Immortan Joe is misusing these things, but they are all markers of progress.

6. At the intersection of politics, economics, self-expression and world-building, one thing someone should write a paper on is the way characters in the Mad Max universe (one of intense scarcity) project power through conspicuous consumption. For instance, the Bullet Farmer flaunts his abundance of ammunition by wearing bullets as clothes and shooting profligately into the distance. Immortan Joe showers his supplicants with water in a naked display of power. The War Boys shoot gouts of flame from the sides of their vehicles, presumably burning precious gasoline in the process.

7. You can't talk about Fury Road without commenting on the names. For some reason in a universe where characters answer to things like Corpus Colossus, Rictus Erectus, Toast the Knowing, and The Doof Warrior, the name I have the hardest time swallowing is Max Rockatansky.

8. Nor can you talk about Fury Road without mentioning the feminist subtext. I think turning the movie into an outright allegory for women's empowerment would be a mistake, for all the reasons that Tolkien disliked allegory: namely that it reduces a rich story to a set of talking points. But short of that, I applaud what the movie did in terms of portraying well-defined and often powerful woman characters. All the more because the movie never turns to the audience and says, "I hope we're all learning something from this." It's possible that George Miller didn't create Imperator Furiosa for Culture Points. Maybe he created her because he thought the character made perfect sense in the world he had created.

9. And the people who actively object to it need to get over themselves.

10. Speaking of George Miller, some folks are surprised that this is the same director who made Babe in 1995. But go back and watch the first scene of Babe and tell me there's no trace of horrific dystopia in that movie.

Advent, Christmas, Fimbulwinter, Epiphany

Where to begin? Not with another apology for letting my blog languish so long, I hope.

Immediately before I left for a long Christmas vacation, my trusty laptop went kaput. I ordered a new laptop, which I had shipped to where I would be on Christmas Eve, and alternated between packing and file recovery the next day. Everything important was saved, I'm pleased to say. What wasn't important wasn't lost--I just haven't bothered moving everything off the old computer because the process is a pain. But all my writing and work files are here, and I didn't have to worry for very long that they were irretrievable.

Since I had just wrapped up a big project that had to be out before Christmas, and I hadn't lined up any work for the week I would be on vacation, being without a computer was almost relaxing. It gave me more time to relax and really focus on the things that are important in life, like food, naps, movies, and presents.

I came home with a supply of good literature (Stephen King's special extra-long edition of The Stand), good games (the first season of Telltale Games' The Walking Dead, as well as the lost trove of my Super Nintendo titles finally uncovered by my dutiful sister in exchange for custody of the N64 and its games*), good music (Florence + the Machine's album "Lungs," which provided the soundtrack for the drives between New York and Philadelphia), a great movie (Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai), good chocolate, and two bottles of Sky River mead, one of a handful of Pacific Northwest beverages that I miss almost as much as my friends who still live there.**

If you've read the news about as much as I have, you've probably noticed that it's cold all over the place. That includes here in Maryland, and although I don't claim to be nearly as hard off as folks in the Midwest, or the folks who recently had to get rescued off an Antarctic research boat, or the people who just had to be rescued off the boat that rescued those people. But it's pretty cold here, and by "here" I mean "inside."

As it happens, my contentious downstairs housemates moved out on New Year's Eve. And it turned out that they called the gas company as they moved out and had the gas shut off. Do I know why? No. Am I going to speculate about their motives or possible negligence in a public forum? Heck no. Can I see my own breath in the dining room? Yes.

If Pepco is as good as its word, this will be sorted out on Monday, which will be very nice. In the meantime, Girlfriend and I have been keeping very close to our favorite space heater.

Not that I want to complain, or, more correctly, not that I want to complain any more. I am not nearly as miserable about the situation as you might think I have right to be. But a maxim I'm coming to believe--and one I beg everyone not to abuse--is that if a situation must be bad it behooves it to also be interesting. It also helps to spend the time in good company, and I suspect I would be a great deal grouchier about this if the school year had resumed on the second.

* If playing Dungeons & Dragons has taught me anything, it's that people will delve for your lost treasure and fight the necessary monsters for you if you let them in exchange for a share of the loot.

** Hey, I said "almost."

A haul of books

I doubt I will ever forgive this area for its lack of bookstores. When I lived in Seattle you couldn't swing a sack of spiders without hitting a used book store. You could not walk down the street with certain people (who you love very much) without being pulled aside into a bookstore for an indeterminate period. (If the store was Twice Sold Tales*, which had cats, your day was pretty much spoken for.)

Living in the University District of Seattle, it seemed natural to be surrounded by entertainments for literate folks. One would expect no less of College Park, Maryland, the municipal albumen of the University of Maryland**. Indeed, the only book store in apparent striking distance of my new place (or for that matter my old place, a stop south on the green line, in Hyattsville) was the UMD college bookstore. The only time I can recall going in there was to buy a board game, of which they had plenty--I don't recall them selling any books although I'm sure there must have been one or two. Anyway, that's gone now too. They uprooted to relocate and, like a demon eight miles from a suitable host, vanished quietly from the mortal realm.

There is a library nearby. The Hyattsville library is actually quite nice, even if it's a bit of a walk away now--but then I learn that it's to be closed for complete destruction and rebuilding soon. I don't know what makes that necessary, and apparently I'm not the only person who isn't in a hurry to see the place torn down.

But I didn't come here to complain about that. It happened that the church which I have recently (if sporadically) been attending had a used book sale, and Girlfriend and I resolved to descend upon it like locusts. As she has a classroom library to stock, she did the most damage, but I am pleased with what I turned up for myself.

I picked up the February 1989 issue of Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction, apparently the only issue which had been donated. The stories in it would have been current when I was four years old, and I certainly wonder what the genre was like at the time, when the internet was nascent and the Hubble Telescope was still being put together.

I found a large hardcover collection of Dashiell Hammett novels, and I hope to get in touch with some of the stories that I know from retelling and pastiche. One, Red Harvest, is a story that comes up again and again (in Yojimbo, A Fistful of Dollars, Last Man Standing, arguably the Conan the Barbarian story "Red Nails," and other, less notable iterations), and which I may try my own hand at if I get around to it.

Perhaps the most interesting find of the day was The Thorough-Bred Poor Gentleman's Book; or, How to Live in London on £100 a Year, a reprint of a slim handbook from 1835 which is essentially what the title claims: a guide to living frugally as a gentleman. It has that offhand wit that seems to happen naturally in books over a century old, but also seems to be a legitimate study in the plight of the declining English nobility in the 19th century. What a dilemma is is, surely, to be constrained in one's income and to be "above" doing anything for oneself--never mind taking definite action to earn more money!

What's said is interesting. What's not said is perhaps more so. One piece of straightforward advice reads: "Never get into a cab or hackney-coach when you can possibly walk." But it is never suggested that you would consider eating fewer than two meals a day outside your own home, make your own bed, or wash your own clothes--although you may apparently brush your own clothes without demeaning yourself, and the maidservant will appreciate it.

It makes me appreciate the freedom of the middle class, to eat my own spaghetti on occasion and do my own laundry without being thought less of.

This, of course, is part of the pleasure of used book sales as opposed to your typical bookstore. Foraging encourages a varied diet.

* Now, sadly, a Chase bank.
** Which this year broke into Playboy Magazine's list of America's top 10 party schools, wouldn't you know.

13 things wrong with Star Trek Into Darkness

Lists are big on the internet these days. Let’s do this.

Spoilers after the jump. You have been warned.